Writings

(originally posted on Medium) After 9 great months working with many startups, I’m joining one. Over the past nine months I’ve been working as an independent product consultant, collaborating with companies in a variety of capacities — product design, product & company strategy, process & org design and a little bit of coaching along the way. Since June I’ve gotten to work closely with 10 companies and I’ve met with over 60. As I suspected, the variety that consulting offers has provided a gr

(originally posted on Medium) As 2015 came to an end, I realized I’ve been working as a consultant since June and I thought it would be useful for me (and hopefully others) to reflect on how it’s gone, what I’ve learned, what I’ve changed, now that I have a decent amount of time and data to look back on. Time is money. Plan accordingly. Time is everyone’s most valuable resource and while most people could benefit greatly from a more rigorous approach to time management, for the independent co

(originally posted on Medium) Back in May, after a little over a year, the company I’d been working with, Sum, closed its doors. The vision — to take wearables beyond data for data’s sake and empower people with the insight necessary to make meaningful improvements to their long term health — was a big swing in a space I cared deeply about. The opportunity to approach it as a designer was something I couldn’t pass up. As with all big swings, I knew there was a high chance of failure but pulli

(originally posted on Medium) I’d started gathering notes on my experience with the Watch on the weekend it was released (a little over a month ago) but quickly realized that the device fit into such a new place in my life that hot takes wouldn’t cut it. Below is the result of me capturing thoughts over the course of about a month and then going back and doing a little revising as some of my hottest takes ended up melting away as I got used to this new device in my life. I wanted to capture th

(originally posted on Medium) This past weekend I ran my best half marathon ever by ~3 minutes and I owe most of it to the Garmin running watch above that I borrowed from my wife. Over the years, I’ve been a heavy user of the Nike Running and Runkeeper apps and while the audio updates they provide on pace and distance are certainly better than nothing, they’re too infrequent to really have a material impact on my runs. I’m also not someone who’s interested in pulling out my phone every few min

(originally posted on Medium) My overwhelming use case (>80 %) for Pinterest is to save something, usually an image/screenshot from my desktop or camera roll or via an extension (both iOS and Chrome). The other 20% is to find something I know I’ve previously saved to one of my boards. Every time I open the Pinterest app, I’m reminded of how small a segment of the Pinterest audience my behavior must represent because I’m surprised at how many steps it is to do either — this is particularly true

(originally posted on Medium) I’ve been longing for something “between Twitter and Medium” and in some respects today’s Medium changes look to be just that. That said, I’m honestly still a little mindfreaked by them and am struggling to get my thoughts in order. Here’s a quick stab: * A few months ago I switched my Twitter bio url to my Medium posts in the hopes that, over time, the product would evolve to replace the blogs many of us used to call home in the late 90s- 2000s. Today’s changes

(originally posted on Medium) A look back at 2014 and forward to 2015 Most years as December winds down, I resolve to change 5–10 things that fall roughly into the categories you’d expect: lose some weight, be more active, sleep better, read more, etc. Before articulating what I’m planning to work on this year, I wanted to look back at what I set out to do last year and see how I fared. I threw down some quick grades on the goals I’d laid out, OKR-style: * Sleep better (0.8) — Gone are the